QUEEN OF DENIAL Chapter Four

 

I know that the King of Egypt, Akhenaten, AKA Amenhotep IV, died around 1336 B.C.E., at about 50 years of age, in the 17^th year of his reign, possibly of a heart attack. It is hard to speak with certainty after 4, 000 years, and until 2010 the only evidence we had were faint hints carved on the walls of ancient monuments and tombs. But using DNA, his mummy (above)  has been identified with a “distinctive, egg-shaped skull, slight spinal scoliosis, impacted wisdom teeth... (and a) cleft palate”.  Combined, these physical characteristics hint at Homocystinuria, an inherited disorder which also often produces glaucoma, which blinds its sufferers. This is what comes from mating with your siblings, as the gene causing this disorder is recessive and develops only when you inherit two copies. But intermarriage was something the Ancient Egyptian nobility often did, keeping the crown and their property, among other things,  in the family. 

If Akhenaten's son had been his co-ruler, then the boy's mother would have been the regent, ruling the nation until the new Pharaoh grew.  But his son (by a “lesser” wife) was not the co-ruler,  Nefertiti was. So on the death of the King, the Queen became the Pharaoh, playing her new role under the name Smenkhkare and/or Neferneferuaten.  She was even depicted in the very un-Queenly activity of wielding a killing mallet (above), dispatching prisoners under the rays of Aten, as her husband had been. This had happened before, when the queen Hatsheput had put on a fake beard and governed for 22 years.  But Hatsheput's Egypt had been unified, while Nefertiti's was a land divided by religion.

Three of her daughters were dead, killed by a plague which  had ravaged Egypt for three years. The followers of Amun Ra saw this as divine punishment for the Aten heresy.  But Nefertiti had been devoted to her husband, and was determined to protect his legacy, their family and their faith.  Her problem was she had few allies inside Egypt.  So she appealed to the only other power that could resist the nobility and the priests, Egypt's mortal enemies; the Hittites.

The only copy we have of the this extraordinary appeal appears in the history compiled by the Hittite King Mursili II. He says the Egyptian Queen dispatched an ambassador to his father, King Suppiluliuma I, with the following plea. “My husband is dead and I have no son. People say that you have many grown sons. If you send me one of your sons he will become my husband for it is repugnant to me to take one of my subjects as a husband.”  The letter did not suggest the Hittite Prince would become Pharaoh, but the offer was unique. It would have been as if, an American President had offered to appoint a Russian as Vice President.  And that could never happen, could it?   The ruling Hittite Council were  suspicious and sent their Chamberlain,  Hattu-Zittish , to see of it was a trap.

Neffertiti's response to this envoy was almost frantic. “Why do you say 'They are trying to deceive me?' If I had a son, should I write to a foreign country in a manner humiliating to me and to my country? You do not believe me and you even say so to me!...I have written to no other country, I have written to you. They say that you have many sons. Give me one of your sons and he will be my husband and lord of the land of Egypt.” There it was, the offer to make a Hittite prince the King of Egypt. And that clinched the deal. Mursili II records, “Because my father was generous, he granted the lady's request and decided to send his son.” What a nice guy.

However, the transaction was never consummated. Shortly after arriving on Egyptian soil the Hittite Prince, Zannanza, was murdered.  Suppililiuma I demanded an explanation. “What have you done with my son?...the blood spilled between us is not right.” But the new Egyptian King gave no explanation. It appears a counter revolution had occurred in Egypt.

During the counter revolution, Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile, Lady of Grace, She Who Comes With Beauty, Great King's Wife, His Beloved, Lady of All Women, Mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt, Pharaoh of Egypt, simply disappeared. Her tomb was never occupied. Her mummy, if she ever had one, has never been found. Her name was scratched off almost all of the temples and her legend was systematically smashed. It appears they even broke into the workshop of Thutmose the Royal Sculptor, to smash and destroy all images of this woman. After even the bricks from the walls of Aketaten were scavenged, the broken images of Nefertiti were left behind, to be swallowed by the desert sands.

Her death was just the beginning. Nefertiti's record as a ruler was wiped clean, almost impossible to reconstruct. Some Egyptologists are still arguing about whether she had died years before her husband.  But she did not. The effort to abolish her memory seems too complete to have been merely punishment for a despot. Even a Stalin is remembered with reverence by some. But Queen Nefertiti, Pharaoh Neferneferuaten, seems to have committed a crime far worse than mere tyranny. She was a traitor, to the faith of her people, to the land of her people, to her role which was to produce sons for her King and nothing more.

The casket of Akhenaten, the Pharaoh who betrayed the faith, was defaced (above). But it was also persevered, probably by his son, the boy King Tutankhamen .Some of the grave goods prepared for Nefertit's tomb were re-gifted and found in Tutankhamen tomb instead. But the woman Akhenaten loved more than any other, received no casket. She received no monument.  Her memory was scratched off, discarded, condemning her to three thousand years of silent death.

And then, out of the darkness of seemingly endless time came a wonk, a German nerd, a Teutonic bookworm, to rescue Nefertiti from obscurity. And for this he was branded a thief.

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QUEEN OF DENIAL Chapter Three

 

I would like to have met Thutmose, the sculptor. Without him we would never have known what a lovely woman  Nefertiti was.  His genius as an artist would not be realized for 4,000 years, but like Michelangelo, even during his own lifetime he was known as a great artist, entrusted with the public image of the two most important politicians in his world, the Pharaoh Akhenaten and his Great Royal Wife.  But more than that, like Leonardo da Vinci he was also an intimate witness to a major revolution in technology that literally built the world we live in.

With few hardwood trees, humans in the Nile Delta first built their homes with mud -  malleable mud -  sometimes formed into bricks, dried solid by the sun.  But each adobe brick swelled and contracted separately with the daily temperature swings, and thus larger structures tended to separate and crack. Stone, the other building material available in Egypt, would last forever, but was hard to work with without metals,  and if the joint where one stone met another was not a perfect, the entire structure was unstable.  And the fit was never perfect. The solution was a combination of the two materials; a malleable stone. In the building trade this is called mortar.

In the Old Kingdom, a thousand years before the birth of Nefertiti, mortar was not used to bind stones together, but merely provided a level surface for their meeting. The fingerprints of ancient Egyptians were recorded as they pushed mortar and mud into nooks and crannies, leveling the joints between the great sandstone blocks of the Pyramids of Giza. But over the next centuries mortar became the subject of a great deal of study, which is when the ancient Egyptians discovered Gypsum.

It was lying about all over Egypt. Its what you get when you dry up an ocean, and other then the bleaching skeletons of ancient whales, large deposits of gypsum are the strongest evidence that the Sahara desert was once an ocean basin. To a modern chemist it is calcium sulfate, and is the primary ingredient in dry wall. Deposits of gypsum so aided the creation of the city of Paris, that the formula used there gave rise to the ubiquitous phrase “Plaster of Paris”, and it can even be used as a fertilizer.

The ancient Egyptians were unaware of most of this, but they did know the material was soft, gritty and eager to dissolve in water.  And when blended in water with limestone or chalk (calcium carbonate), it produced the sought after malleable stone. During the middle of the 18^th dynasty (1400 – 1300 B.C.E.) the use of gypsum mortars became standard throughout Egypt.  Now houses and smaller temples could be built of standardized mud blocks, joined by and coated with a binding agent of similar properties, so the entire structure expanded and contracted as one. It made the construction of the new city of Aketaten possible.   And with a few modifications to the formula, it made Thutmose a better artist.

Perhaps someday a new study of Egyptology will open a tomb and find the name Thutmose on a painted mural, with his mummy resting securely beneath. But I doubt it. I fear it far more likely that we will only know him by the few examples of his works that survived in his workshop on the southeast corner of a slum lined street in the southern section of Aketaten. What if the only evidence we had of Leonardo Di Vinci was the Mona Lisa and his crumbling masterpiece, “The Last Supper”? What would we think of him if we did not have his notebooks on anatomy, or his drawings of a flying machine? That is where we are in our appreciation of the world's first identifiable great artistic genius, Thutmose.

He must have begun with a plaster mask, poured directly on the subject's face. This is an indignity suffered by Hollywood actors today, and was possible here only because the Pharaoh Akhenaten (above) had endorsed Thutmose's “naturalistic” artistic revolution. Once the plaster cast had been created, it was used as a guide for carving limestone busts. Nefertiti's bust was 19 inches tall and weighed 44 pounds, or probably almost half of what the Queen's head weighed in life. Several busts of members of the court have survived, and provide an opportunity for living humans to look half way back to the invention of agriculture, directly into the real face of their  ancestors. What returns your gaze is a human, very much like people you know.

The limestone busts were a major technical achievement, but it was now that Thutmose the artist stepped up, as he “worked from life”,  applying plaster to the bust, to perfectly match the person sitting before him. In the case of Queen Nefertiti, Thutmose captured “laugh lines” around the corners of her mouth and cheeks, a bump on her nose, bags under her eyes and wrinkles beginning on her neck. He even flattened her cheek bones a little, indicating perhaps a slight change in weight between the casting, and the carving of the stone. This was a great beauty in her middle age, the mother of six girls, with gravity taking its toll, as it does to all of us. And when the plaster additions satisfied the artist, Thutmose then added yet another layer of stucco, smoothing the lines, straightening the nose, perhaps to please his model. She was, after all, the Queen, and vanity is a very human trait, but unlimited vanity a royal one.

And then he painted the face to life, using black quartz held in place with beeswax for the iris of her one eye. For the blue of her jewels he used ground glass with copper oxide. For the yellow bands in her crown he used arsenic sulfide (the mineral orpiment), and for the green crown of Egypt, powdered glass and cooper and iron oxide. The black eyeliner was coal and beeswax, with red chalk for the lips. Her rich skin tone was recreated by adding red chalk to lime spar, also known as our old friend mortar.

The assumption is that the bust which survives today in a Berlin museum, was created as a guide for apprentice artists to produce the many copies that would have sat in the offices of bureaucrats and in temples from the Nile Delta to the southern reaches of Kush, beyond the cataracts of the Nile. This was not the image of a queen on a coin, but the real face of a real woman, who you would recognize if you saw her on the street or sat  next to you in the theatre. And this is the first time in human history that such a face was created and has survived for 4,300 years, half way back to the birth of agriculture.

Gaze into her face. This was the woman whom the Pharaoh declared to be his co-ruler in the 12^th year of his reign, equal in power with the king himself. No King that we know of had ever named his wife as co-ruler.  Now her word was law, just as his was.  A hundred years previously the widow Hatsheput had successfully ruled for 22 years as Pharaoh, establishing the wealth that ensured the survival of the 18^th dynasty.  But she had first been regent for her young nephew, before taking power herself.  Nefertiti had no such justification. Why would Akhenaten promote her to power?  He must have trusted her with his life, and more, with his revolution.

By 1338 B.C.E, it must have been clear to Akhentaten that his revolution had failed. The new faith had not spread beyond his new capital. Worse, his orders were being ignored, within and without the empire. His border with the Hittites, who were centered in modern day Turkey, was crumbling. What could have cause him to share his power at such a crucial moment? There are hints and rumors that the King, the Pharaoh, the beloved of the sun god Aten,  had gone blind.

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QUEEN OF DENIAL Chapter Two

 

I know just what the Pharaoh was looking for – a spot where the sandstone cliffs closed in to within half a mile of the river, and where the once-in-a-century flash floods had sliced a V-shaped notch in the canyon rim, carving a dry canyon or wadi opening toward the river. Perhaps the King already had such a location in mind, or perhaps Bek, his Chief of Works, knew just the spot where every morning the sun-god Aten would first dramatically peek into the life giving valley of the Nile. The spot they chose was 100 miles south of the Old Kingdom capital of Memphis, and 150 miles north of the New Kingdom capital of Thebes. Here, almost equal distance between the two historical  power centers of Egypt, Amenhotep IV decided to begin his revolution.

The Pharaoh was able to build his new city of Aketaten almost at will because of a recent technological import, the shaduf (above). Wikipedia explains this was “an upright (tripod) frame on which is suspended a long pole... At the long end of this pole hangs a bucket, skin bag, or bitumen-coated reed basket. The short end carries a weight...When correctly balanced... some effort is used to pull an empty bucket down to the water, but only the same effort is needed to lift a full bucket...a shaduf can raise over 2,500 liters (of water) per day.” With this relative new tool, irrigation ditches and fields to grow enough coarse wheat, beans and lentils to feed a city could be established anywhere along the Nile.

But the King could have no secrets from his Grand Vizier, who was also the High Priest of Amun-Ra. And it was that priest,  Huy, through his bureaucrats up and down the river, who assisted in planning and assembling for this assault upon the god Amun Ra. Only the power of the army would have kept Huy from striking back in defense of his god and his own power. Still, throughout 1347 and 1346 B.C.E. , as preparations continued, Thebes must have been a very tense place.

On  13 October of 1345 B.C.E., the fifth year of the Pharaoh’s reign, at the beginning of the cool winter months, they dedicated the start of construction of Aketaten, the "Horizon of the Aten". To the east of the 8 mile long construction site a walled village had been prepared for the artisans, foremen and skilled workers - some 64 simple mud brick row houses in a neat rectangle, with a guard house at the only exit. With 5 – 10 men per house, this would have contained over 600 men. In addition each region would have paid part of their yearly taxes with unskilled workers, who would sleep and eat in tents or in the open.

First to be built was the Chapel of the Great Temple to Aten - the rest of the temple would come in time.  At the same time the royal palace and estates were started, barracks for soldiers and military headquarters, all to the north of the new temple.  A ditch separated this section from the central city, with large houses for court officials and priests of Aten, each with their own grain storehouses, and, of course, more temples to Aten.  Here, as well, were homes for the clerks and head servants, and the workshop of the highest ranking member of the division of Works who moved to Aketaten, Bek's assistant, Thutmose, the sculpture.  As you moved southward through the city along the “Royal Road”, the homes got smaller, all white washed mud brick and built quickly. The western edge of the city was the High Priest Street, ending in the large temple granaries among the slums and workers' apartments of the southern section.

Carved into the crowding cliffs were to be the tombs of the priests and functionaries who had converted to the new faith.  And up the canyon leading toward that V-shaped notch in the cliff, in what became the royal wadi, was to be carved the magnificent tomb of Nefertiti and her King, Amenhotep IV.  It was at the dedication and ground breaking ceremony that the King took the next step in his revolution.  He publicly changed his name.  The Pharaoh decreed that henceforth he would be known as Akhenaten, “The Spirit of Aten”.  It was a declaration of war between the power of the King and his god Aten, and the power of Huy and his god Amun Ra.

“His Majesty mounted a great chariot of electrum, like the Aten when He rises on the horizon and fills the land with His love, and took a goodly road to Aketaten, the place of origin (where Aten's light first fell on the Nile each morning), which (the Aten) had created for Himself that he might be happy therein. It was His son Akhenaten (the Pharaoh), who founded it for Him...Heaven was joyful, the earth was glad (and) every heart was filled with delight when they beheld him.”

His new city had no walls, as if the King were defying Huy to move against him. But Huy could afford to be patient. The strength of Amun Ra (above) did not spring merely from the wealth of its most powerful acolytes such as Huy, but also from its appeal to the masses. They trusted the god “who hears the prayer, who comes at the cry of the poor and distressed..”  Even when he didn't.  Most Egyptians confessed their sins to the merciful and forgiving Lord of Thebes, Amun Ra. “Though it may be that the servant is normal in doing wrong, yet the Lord is normal in being merciful. The Lord of Thebes does not spend an entire day angry...As the Ka (soul) endures, thou will be merciful” And Huy knew the power of this simple idea, that the world was not created merely to please the kings and queens, but that they were created to serve the world. Amun Ra was the faith of the people. Aten was the faith of the King. And they both were moves toward monotheism.

While his new capital was being prepared, Akhenaten, who had been Amenhotep IV, returned to Thebes and step by step pushed his revolution. All donations to Amun Ra were temporarily diverted to the priesthood of Aten, to support construction of Aketaten . But over time that would become permanent. In 1343 B.C.E. the Pharaoh left Thebes for the last time, taking his dear wife, Nefertiti, his harem, his advisers and  most of the government to his new city. None were allowed follow him to Aketaten, unless they had publicly renounced Amun Ra and the other old religions, and sacrificed to Aten. This meant that none could appeal their case directly to the king unless they had first converted. But a small statue of Osiris found within the site of Aketaten, shows that for many, this conversion was a matter of convenience only.

Next, the Pharaoh decreed that all other faiths were apostate, and illegal. He ordered the closure of all temples to Osiris, Isis, Ptah, Mut and Amun Ra,. Further  he order the desecration of the images of all other Egyptian gods.  The carved name of the gods, their “ren”, was to be scratched out of the blessings and oaths inscribed in all temples and tombs. It was an act of desecration under the old religion, for without a ren the gods could not assist the deceased to rise from the dead. In effect, it damned the Pharoah's own father, and all fathers and mothers of all of Egypt to the eternal cold night. The destruction was carried out in Thebes, but the absence of resistance to this royal decree seems to indicate it was carried out in few other places in Egypt. And, since Akhenaten had sworn to never leave Aketaten again, it was unlikely he would ever know of this defiance. The Pharaoh continued to issue edicts. And increasingly they were ignored. Either he was willing to be lied to, or he was unaware his self imposed isolation was depriving him of control of everything beyond the the walls of his new palace. Or he had lost his mind.

Nine years after he had ascended the twin thrones of Egypt, in 1341 B.C.E., the King's mother, Queen Tiji, arrived in Aketaten unannounced, and without conversion to Aten. She was delivering a message to the King, and he would have to listen to her. The relationship between divine kings and their mothers is always difficult for the King. It may be easy to convince strangers that you are a god, but your mother remembers how you came into the world, and it was aboard no chariot of electrum. It was Tiji who convinced her son to cool down his revolution. But whether she told him his decrees were being ignored, or warned him the army had reached the breaking point of support is unclear. But we know that after her visit the revolution abruptly came to a halt. There would be no more changes in Egypt. And we know that Tiji did not stay in Aketaten very long.

The king did not renounce his new faith. Nor did he leave Aketaten. But he restricted himself to rides on the Royal Road that went no where except to his daily absolution in the Great Temple of Aten,. His life became centered on his beloved main wife-sister, now called Neferneferuaten-Nefertiti, “The Aten is radiant of radiance because the beautiful one has come.” And I think it was now she sat as a model for the sculptor Thutmose, as he created one of the most famous icons of art in the history of the world.

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QUEEN OF DENIAL Chapter One

 

I warn you that meeting an icon in the flesh is almost always disappointing. Kings and queens, gods and saints, zealot and demagogue are really just stone cold reflections of their acolytes' vision. Real heroes have feet of clay, and it is the clay that is usually the interesting part. With clay you can shape mountains, build palaces, sculpt river valleys, hold warm food or a cold drink, even record legends. But what are you to do when you meet an icon that is both stone and clay? What are we to make of Nefertiti?

At first glance she is a contradiction, the definition of feminine beauty and royal imperiousness, at once immediate and distant, warm and lifeless. She is iconically Egyptian, and yet she now sits alone in a room in Berlin, Germany. She is a Mona Lisa in sandstone, and clay and plaster, powdered glass and arsenic sulfide, coal and beeswax. And so lifelike you might expect her to suddenly rise and walk out of the room, except she is 4,300 years old. And she has no legs. She is the illusion of a genius, a display of talent and skill that humans would not achieve again until Michelangelo turned stone into an apprehensive David. And yet she was abandoned, discarded as sacrilegious trash, forgotten in the ruins, not worth picking up or going back for. And we are forever in the debt of the fools who wanted her forgotten forever.

The real woman was bred to be a ruler, bred to be a breeder of rulers, who only produced six girls for her husband. Because of that it was the men in her lives who defined Nefertiti. Her father Ay was ambitious, and used her beauty to grasp for power. Her husband, a scarecrow of a misshapen prince who became the Pharaoh Amenhotep IV was one of the most powerful and extraordinary mad men in history. And likely her brother. She was immortalized by the artist Thutmose, a bureaucrat, the Chief of Works for the Pharaoh, but who was artist enough to dare capture her honest humanity in plaster. And she was saved from obscurity by a Prussian academic, Ludwig Borchardt, an overachiever, a dedicated student of ancient Egypt, a savvy horse trader, and a fervent German nationalist. And to her list of admirers and fans  we have to add Adolf Hitler and George Patton and an arrogant Egyptian archaeologist. Consider all of that and you might begin to understand the difficulty in finding the real woman behind the statue. 

The dominance of those men might explain why we do not know her real name. History records her as Nefertiti (above), which translates as “The Beauty Has Come”. And that she was. But that name was bestowed by her husband, and royal Egyptians changed their names every time they changed their roles in life. Her younger sister's name was Mutbenret, a common girl's name meaning “Sweet one of Mut”. Mut was the mother goddess of Egypt. Unless they had a different father (which was certainly possible) Nefertiti's original name was probably closer to her sister. As a queen of the Nile, Nefertiti was also known as the Great Royal Wife, Lady of Grace, Sweet Love, Lady of all Women, Lady of the Two Lands, Mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt. And Egypt was the stage upon which she performed all of her roles, those of the living breathing woman, and those of a stone and plaster icon, missing an eye to keep her a icon soulless.

An ancient Egyptian proverb says “Help yourself and the Nile will help you.” Egypt has been defined by the river for 12,000 years, since the sluggish White and pulsing Blue Nile's first joined and began chasing the retreating Mediterranean Sea northward. From their junction just above the 5^th cataract (modern day Khartoum), the Nile traverses 1,200 miles of desert in a great S curve. Then, at Aswan and the first cataract, the placid river heads due north for another 930 miles, a mile wide moving oasis dividing lifeless sands, to modern day Cairo. Over its final 100 miles above Cairo the river divides into two again, the Damietta and the Rosetta channels,  before reaching the sea. And it was here, in the 150 mile wide Nile Delta that Lower Egypt was born first.  Later, three hundred miles lower on the river,  Upper Egypt formed around the city of Abydos. About 3150 B.C.E. (5,000 years ago), the two kingdoms were united when Namer, ruler of Lower Egypt took as his bride the Upper Egyptian princess Neithhotep, meaning “loved of Neith”.

At the end of 1350 B.C.E., when Amenhotep III died after 38 years on the throne, the capital of Egypt was Thebes. Egypt had reached its pinnacle – of wealth and power and influence and art. But the 45 year old man who wore the twin crowns had grown timid and fat, racked by debilitating arthritis and that most Egyptian of ailments, dental abscesses – developed by a life time of grinding sand grains in every mouthful of food. Amenhotep III's devotions to the minor god Aten, the sun disk, grew to match his agonies. His great wife, Tyie, had assumed many of his duties, as he prepared to enter the city of the dead. Only near the end was the Pharaoh's eldest surviving son, who had been schooled away from Thebes, finally brought back to the palace. His absence had kept him safe but woefully inexperienced in politics.

The term Pharaoh began as the name of the King's “Great House” - his palace. But it had come to refer not only to the god-man on the throne, but to the palace servants, the bureaucrats and functionaries, much as the term “White House” is used today. This institutionalized Pharaoh was supported by two pillars of power, the army which obeyed only the King's commands and the priesthood of the god Amun-Re (pronounced Amun-Ra). The god Amun had started as a local deity of Thebes, but through centuries of donations by wealthy nobility and even Pharaohs, the god Amun-Re had grown to ultimate power, co-opting many of the old gods into an all encompassing triad deity, the father, son and holy ghost. According to an Egyptian proverb, “All gods are three... He who hides his name as Amun (the invisible father), he appears to the face as Re (the sun), whose body is Ptah.(the creator). By 1350 B.C.E. the priesthood of Amun-Re controlled up to 30% of all land in Egypt, vast wealth and estates, armies of slaves and fleets of ships; even more numerous than the Pharaoh's.

The man who placed the twin crowns of Egypt on Amenhotep IV's head was the High Priest Amenhotep-Huy (above). He had also been the previous Pharaoh's Vizier, or chief of staff, and his “Director of Works for Upper and Lower Egypt”, Superintendent of the Harem; Overseer of the Double Treasury of the Great Royal Wife, and Steward of Queen Tiji.  And he continued in those posts under the new Pharaoh, because Huy had allies in both the government and the faith, making him the second most powerful man in Egypt. In some ways, the most powerful. In addition Huy was a wealthy man in his own right, from a powerful delta family. He personally owned large estates and an exclusive resort on the “Reed Sea” where he rewarded his supporters with lavish vacations. He had even dared to dictate to the old and weak previous Pharaoh.

The new young ruler (above) waited, squirming against the restraints placed on him by Huy. At first he went about his duties, dedicating several new temples in Thebes and its religious suburb of Karnak, including one close to his father's heart, the Gempaaten (“the Aten is found in the estate of the Aten”). Most of these temples had been started by his father, and built by his chief architect Bek. But it seems Amenhotep had begun to feel out those around him. We know he encouraged Bek to turn away from the standardized art of his father - and Huy. Amenhotep urged Bek to draw and sculpt more closely from life. The young king and his beautiful wife spreading such revolutionary messages must have set off sparks of support among the young artisans in his service.

After two years Amenhotep and Nefertiti had two daughters (above), Meritaten (she who is loved of Aten) and Meketaten (she who is protected by Aten). As their names indicated, the Pharaoh had begun to turn his private face away from Amun- Re. He was growing more determined that when he finally had a son, the boy should never be forced to kowtow before a mere functionary, a priest like Huy. An idea was forming in Amenhotep's mind, a way to freedom, a sweeping away of the old way of doing things, breathing new life into his Kingdom, and using some of that great wealth his father had guarded to restrain the smothering Priesthood of Amun-Re.

In the third year of his reign, Amenhotep IV ordered Bek to dispatch royal engineers up the Nile, looking for a spot away from Thebes where a new city could be established, a new city dedicated to the god Aten. What he did not tell anyone yet, was that he intended this new city be the new capital of Egypt; to be named Akhetaten

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BLOOD AND GUTS AND NO SEATBELT

 

I think the simplest way to describe George Smith Patton junior  is in his own words: as “an outgoing introvert”. He was a poet and a life long klutz, constantly bruising himself and falling off his polo ponies. An Olympic athlete and swimmer, he lost a marksmanship competition in the Stockholm games of 1912 because he was too accurate - the judges ruled his later bulls eyes, which went through the same holes as his earlier bulls-eyes, were misses. They were not.

In 1932 Patton led the U.S. Army’s last cavalry charge - against a “bonus army” of protesting U.S. army  World War One veterans.  He was a lifelong anti-Semite, who smuggled a copy of Hitler’s anti-Semitic “Nuremberg Laws” back to the United States so it could be preserved as an example of the dangers of religious bigotry.

His father served under Confederate General J.E.B. Stuart, and a great-uncle was wounded at Picket’s Charge, defending black slavery. But while others refused, Patton requested a regiment of Black tankers be assigned to his Third Army.

Between mid-July  1944 and May 1945 Patton's 3rd Army moved further and faster than any army in history.  Patton's soldiers captured 765,000 German soldiers, killed 144,000 and wounded 387,000 more. In late May of 1945, when he made a brief trip home to Los Angeles, he was greeted by a parade and a cheering crowd of 100,000 at the coliseum.   But despite his contributions to the victory,  on 2 October, 1945 George Patton was removed from command because he refused allow Germany to starve (Joint Chiefs of Staff directive #1067).

The orders of his dismissal were insulting and they were meant to be. General Eisenhower forbid Patton from making any public statements or to speak to the press on any issue. As a result there was no explanation as to why he had suddenly lost his beloved Third Army. But  he was still assigned to Europe,  which kept him out of sight and away from microphones back in America. It was as if General Eisenhower was already running for President.

On the Saturday before he was scheduled to return to the United States for the Christmas holidays Patton had dinner with his chief-of-staff, Major General Hobart R. “Hap” Gay. According to Gay, Patton had reached a momentous decision. After a lifetime of service, “I am going to resign from the Army,” Gay quoted Patton as saying. “For the years that are left to me, I am determined to be free to live as I want to and to say what I want to”.  Patton had inherited a family fortune and he now intended to use the independence that money provided to finish his memoir, “War As I Knew It”, and tell his “unvarnished truth” about Eisenhower and General Marshall and General Omar Bradley. Had he done so, there can be little doubt, Patton would have shown himself to be a complicated conservative politician. 

The next day, Sunday, 10 December 1945,  Gay and Patton set off at 7 a.m. for a hunting trip in the forests outside of the Bavarian Cathedral town of Spry. It was a cold and overcast morning.

They traveled in two vehicles, a half ton truck driven by Sergeant Joe Spruce with their luggage and rifles, while the Generals rode in a 12 foot long 1938 Cadillac Fleetwood sedan, all steel and chrome with a spacious interior, powered by a Detroit V-6 block engine, and driven by Patton’s regular driver, 20 year old Private first class Horace L. Woodring. Fewer than 600 of these cars had been built and how this one got to Europe is unknown.

Part of the limousine’s stylish additions included a window and divider between the driver and the passengers’ compartment, and a small rectangular silver plaque on the divider with the word “Fleetwood ” embossed in sweeping script.  About 11:30 they exited the autobahn at Mannerheim and took route 38 south.

On the outskirts of the devastated city the two vehicle convoy came to the multiple tracks of the bombed out railroad yards (above).  Here Sergeant Spruce sped ahead, while the Cadillac was required to stop for a short freight train.   Woodring then crossed the tracks and resumed his speed of about 30 miles an hour.

He wrote later that the road was clear ahead except for an on-coming 2 ½ ton truck – a deuce and a half – about a half mile up the road.  Stretching along both sides of the road was the overflow from a quartermaster’s tank repair depot - burned out and broken tanks parked on both shoulders.

As they sped past this detritus Patton, who was sitting on the right side of the rear bench seat, commented on the wastage of war.  One tank caught his attention and he turned his body and pointed off to the left, saying, “And look at that heap of rubbish”. Gay turned to look to look and so did Woodring, the driver. It was 11:48 a.m.

The approaching truck suddenly turned to its left, into the repair yard, directly across the path of the Cadillac. Woodring slammed on his brakes, but it was too late. At impact the truck was going no more than 15 miles an hour - the Cadillac probably less than twenty. But nobody in either vehicle was wearing a seat belt. The big Cadillac slid a few feet and then thudded into the right side of the truck's  external fuel tank. The impact was so light that the fuel tank was not even cracked.

The front chrome grill of the Cadillac however was shattered like a boxer's front teeth, and the left front wheel hub was twisted and broken off, revealing the tire beneath (above). But the massive steel frame of the Cadillac then performed its unintended function and transferred most of the force of the accident directly to the passengers’ bodies. Sitting in the backseat, General Gay was thrown forward and then back against the seat. And Patton, who was already leaning forward and half turned to his left, was thrown off the bench seat and fell against the divider, his forehead striking the Fleetwood plaque, tearing a small section of skin and bending his neck sharply backward. In recoil he then fell across Gay on the seat.

Patton (above left)  immediately asked Gay  (above right) if he was hurt. “Not a bit, Sir”, Gay assured him. Gay then asked, “And you, General?” Patton immediately replied, “I think I’m paralyzed. I’m having trouble breathing, Hap.” Woodring helped Gay out from beneath Patton, made sure help had been summoned. He then approached the driver of the truck, Private Robert Thompson. Woodring would later contend that Thompson was drunk, but Patton insisted that no actions be taken against the truck’s driver.

A doctor and an ambulance quickly arrived, and at 12:45 p.m. Patton was admitted to the 130th Station Hospital at Heidelberg, Germany.  An x-ray instantly revealed what the doctors suspected; a simple fracture of the third vertebra with a posterior dislocation of the fourth vertebra, also known as the Hangman's Fracture.

In short, Patton had broken his neck and was paralyzed from there down. There was still a chance he could recover, but the doctors could not be certain until the swelling of his spinal cord had gone down.

Patton was taken to surgery and two “Crutcheld” (fishhook) tongs were inserted below his cheek bones to apply traction to his neck. By the next morning the traction had reduced the dislocation, but the swelling had not yet gone down.

To the constant stream of senior officers who visited him, Patton was cheerful. In private to his nurse he was depressed and frightened. Eisenhower did not visit, nor did  Patton's immediate superior, General Bradley . Then on the morning of 12 December Patton reported that he could move his left index finger, slightly. His wife arrived that morning, having been flown from California. She warned the doctors that the General had a history of embolisms.

On 13 December 1945, Patton showed strength in his left arm and right leg. But that was as far as the improvements were to go. Abruptly the sixty-one year old began losing ground. He was given plasma and protein, as albumen. On  20 of December Patton reported trouble breathing. An X-ray confirmed that he had a blood clot in his right lung. He was now suffering from pneumonia and was placed on oxygen. Late on 21 December, 1945  Patton whispered to his wife, “It’s too dark. I mean too late.” Shortly afterward he died, from injuries which could have been prevented with a simple seat belt.

The official cause of death was listed as heart failure. On Christmas Eve, 1945, in a pouring rain, General George S. Patton was laid to rest in the U.S. military cemetery at Hamm, Luxembourg. As the casket was lowered a chaplain repeated one Patton's favorite sayings: "Death is as light as a feather."

I would prefer to remember General George S. Patton by something else he said. “Anyone, in any walk of life, who is content with mediocrity is untrue to himself and to American tradition." But I fear I will always remember that but for a simple seat belt, it was, as he once predicted, “A hell of a way to die.”

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